By John Crawford

AMATEUR genealogy being my hobby for several decades, I’ve always recognised that mortality is variable. My trawling through the births, marriages, and deaths data, cemetery and census etc records, has resulted in elation, sadness and tragedy, sometimes together in a short space of time.

I was elated to discover that one of my 2x great-grandmothers had won a paternity case at Ayr Sheriff Court in 1854 against the Kilwinning farmer who’d impregnated her with my father’s granny. And that my middle name (Faulds) commemorates the maiden name of a 3x great-grandmother from Beith, Ayrshire, who married a tenant farmer from Bute and died on the island in 1846. Personal sadness in learning that a 3x great-grandfather, a master shoemaker had lived into his 98th year only to be buried “a pauper”.

And the tragedies of finding page after page of deaths from measles in Kilbirnie in the early 1920s; and graves where couples had over a decade, interred a child either “stillborn” or “of 6 hours” most years.

The crowning glory was unearthing the background to a 2x great-grandfather having to leave his tenant farm on Bute. Family lore was that he’d been involved in a political conspiracy in the 1865 General Election when in fact all he was guilty of was walking into the polling station and bravely (or foolishly depending on how you look at it) voting for the Liberal candidate, ignoring a warning from the estate factor that anybody doing so “would be put out of their farm”. And so he moved his young family from his second marriage to Ayrshire and started farming there.

There have been some smiles as well, for example another 3x great-grandfather whose girlfriend bore him a son before he married somebody else and had a family of three surviving children. The girlfriend obviously hadn’t held a grudge as she bore him another daughter during his marriage so he had two daughters born within months of each other. But after his first wife died, he then married the girlfriend and had a further three children with her.

I’ve always inclined towards the idea that our individual lives were a bit like gardening: you sow a packet of seeds knowing that some will never germinate; of those that do, you prick them out and some fail to thrive. You then transplant the survivors but some are lost to frost and predators, while others grow and flourish better than the rest, and last longer. That’s nature’s way. We can intervene with feeding, watering, insecticide etc but will never achieve 100per cent success.

And so I now contemplate the possibility of succumbing to the current virus that is traversing the planet. Will we face its potential to ravage our society with the stoicism that our forebears exhibited? They too had to cope with virulent outbreaks at a time when there were no antibiotics and far less understanding of infectious disease. My late father and mother-in-law were both in the same fever hospital (but not at the same time) outside Dalry, Ayrshire as youngsters suffering from diphtheria and scarlet fever. Happily they survived. Time alone will tell if our society can come through the present outbreak that is so cruel to the most vulnerable in our society. But I for one can’t say I wasn’t warned.

John Crawford worked in the Scottish waste industry for many years